Engineering and the Environment, University of Southampton

Aeronautics and Astronautics

Second Year Aeronautic, Astronautic, and Mechanical Engineering students

Supervisors

Dr David Toal

The multirotor design, build, and test is a second year activity where students working in groups of five, employ their knowledge of mechanical systems design, computer programming and control to design and build a quadcopter capable of autonomously flying to a fixed altitude of 1m and dropping a beanbag.

Each group is provided with an identical set of batteries, propellers, motors, speed controllers and an Arduino Uno and Adrx kit and it’s up to them to build the aircraft structure and a flight computer capable of completing the bean bag challenge autonomously. Flight tests are conducted within the multirotor testing arena at the University of Southampton Boldrewood Innovation Campus where assessments are made of manual and automated flight performance, build quality, design innovation and flight computer performance.